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Weezer Take Off
Author: Steve Knopper (Rolling Stone)
Published: August 8, 2002
- Band hits the road with (another!) new CD done
AS IF REHEARSING FOR their summer tour wasn't enough to keep Weezer busy, the band also found time to record a new album. After releasing Maladroit in May, the group cut forty new songs in two and a half weeks: Weezer's third CD in less than two years is due next February.
Don't expect to hear new songs on the band's summer tour, though. "We've been playing those forty songs every day, so I'm happy to go back and play material from our released albums," says singer Rivers Cuomo.
On Weezer's second tour stop, July 7th at Red Rocks Amphitheater in Morrison, Colorado, the band stuck with its time-tested formula: booming electric guitars, Beach Boys melodies and lyrics about depression and isolation. Cuomo narrated the show from behind a Gibson Explorer guitar that looked bigger than he did. "That was a badass riff! Soon to be followed by another!" he declared before opening the show with "Photograph," "Say It Ain't So" and "Dope Nose."
The only new material at Red Rocks was Cuomo's outfit: a snazzy charcoal suit and blue tie that made him look like a millennial-rock up-date of Cheap Trick guitarist Rick Nielsen. Cuomo bought the suits in Korea after the band's recent Japanese tour. "I was really cold in an air-conditioned restaurant, so I went across the street to the department store to get a jacket," he says. "Before I knew it, ten salesladies were throwing all these clothes on me. I walked out a half-hour later with a suit on, and I've been wearing suits ever since."
In a little over an hour, the band played eighteen songs. Its only overindulgences in a set of short, tight anthems (and the rare sensitive ballad such as "O Girlfriend") were two prolonged, ear-splitting bursts of guitar feedback. Naturally, the 6,500 fans at the not-quite-sold-out show dutifully raised cigarette lighters and flashed the W gesture.
"If people are expressing stoke factor, I'm all for it," Cuomo says of the lighters. "Sometimes it comes out in dorky ways. And I'm certainly guilty of that myself I bust out metal poses all the time. But I'm not out there thinking, 'Am I being ironic? Am I being serious?' I'm just stoked."
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